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    For those that make their living

    since i trade front month options mostly, yes these have little time to expiration. as butterflies i benefit from time decay. by having extra units on the wings i have gamma only if there is a big move outside the wings. i don't look at these trades as +gamma so much as simply fixed risk trades...
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    For those that make their living

    i trade 98% options on stocks. 2% index options. i trade 90% front month options. if there is any running theme to my trading it is "buy the wings and sell the meat." by that i mean that i mostly trade positions that look like butterflies with curvature at the wings (extra wing units which...
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    idiotic question about options MM

    shows you how long its been since i was on the floor. man that rule used to stick me all the time. i just scoped around the cboe site and it looks like they eliminated even the raes minimums on everything but the indexes. oh well thanks for correcting me.
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    idiotic question about options MM

    another thing to note is that wherever your order is routed, if it is an exchange, the market makers will be obligated to meet a fill at that price for a minimum number of contracts. so if you specify say the CBOE and place an offer to sell one contract at 5.90. then an order to buy comes in for...
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    Luck in Options Trading!

    ah i see what i did. i plugged in a value for expected return (of +8.5% or the approximate long term return on the index). that does skew the result. thanks for pointing this out.
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    Luck in Options Trading!

    you're basically wrong on this assumption. also i was using implied not historic vol. it's pretty conclusively demonstrated that implied volatility is the best estimate of future actual volatility. sure, you can always point to exceptions but if you trade long enough you find this to be true...
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    Luck in Options Trading!

    it's been a while since i took a stats class but i'm pretty sure i'm correct on this. in fact i just rechecked with the hoadley function for probability the index would be down below 101 at expiration and it generated 0.91% this is true but there are other variables such as changes in IV to...
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    My Options Play

    way too many other preoccupations
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    My Options Play

    usually it's because the MM can take off risk on a position with the trade. or it might simply be a scalp on a previous trade. sometimes it's also a way to clear out a small order that get's in the way of a bigger spread trade being quoted. not necessarily true. that's the whole problem -...
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    My Options Play

    you can follow any of my comments on this board by just clicking on my post history. the point of view that most matches mine on these boards seems to be maverick and riskarb. i've posted trades in other places mostly to illustrate some techniques such as butterfly management (see...
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    My Options Play

    what i meant by my comment that gamblers are good for my trading is that in general if someone does not know how options operate they are creating opportunity for those that do know. i'm in the business as a pro (read my earlier comments - i was a market maker on the cboe) and have never...
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    My Options Play

    you're kidding right? what options pro would ever look at "buy/sell" ratios (whatever that is)? even if anyone ever did look at trade volume for some reason, if you had checked PEET options, multi was pretty much the whole party on the days he traded. how would you read those tea leaves...
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    Luck in Options Trading!

    anyone can come up with examples of how astronomical returns COULD be made. e.g. i could show how if you pick the lottery numbers correctly you could turn $1 into $50MM in just one day. the point is that to consistently find options that double in a week and then pyramid this success X times...
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    Luck in Options Trading!

    that particular quote was half hyperbole, half supposition based on experience. i don't have any hard data but years of personal experience and talking with a lot of traders and brokers pretty much confirms that most options traders - whether winners or losers - are generally right about 50% of...
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    Luck in Options Trading!

    not sure you are asking this the right way. basically if you are a winning trader you are more prudent thinking it's ALL due to luck until you can prove you've traded successfully, consistently (e.g. profitable month after month for multiple years) over many trades (say > 1,000) in many...
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    Writing options for a living

    that's still incredible. if you can get off bets with any size and keep this performance, screw options trading , you can make a living at the track!
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    My Options Play

    if you can back up your boast fine. as i wrote in one of my earlier posts "whatever works, works." but that doesn't change my opinion of the nature of your trading (high risk, seemingly ignorant of how options work, disregard for sane money management, undisiplined). very few can succeed...
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    Writing options for a living

    parimutual betting like on horse races is a very good analogy to the options market: zero-sum, negative expectancy because of the house take. and the tote odds of a horse winning are about as accurate as option prices are to future value - which is pretty much dead on. the information flow...
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    My Options Play

    yeah i'm probably running ahead of somebody. how would you interpret this from "Stock Options Made Easy" thread on 10-9-05? sure sounds like your about to go fishing here....
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    My Options Play

    if someone wins 90% of the time consistently it is likely not luck. but who knows, there are some that argue warren buffett is a beneficiary of survivorship bias. um, i think that's the point here. you haven't said anything about how you pick trades other than some reliance on TA mumbo...
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